I wonder to what extent our current interest in knowing exactly how old we are is related to an increasing expectation that what we’ll die of will probably be, in effect, old age.
When people were very likely to die of disease, injury, or childbirth long before they got old, it may have seemed less relevant to think ‘my mother lived to 84, my father to 92, I’m only 60, I’ve got quite a while yet’ (though also less unnerving than to think ‘my mother lived to 87 but my father only to 69 and I’m already 70 and what if I’m more like him than her?’)
But modern lawmaking may be more of a factor. If a society’s going to have a minimum age for legal drinking, marriage, signing contracts, going to jail with adults, or whatever: a society made up of many millions of people pretty much has to do that by assigning a specific age. It matters, in modern society, whether you’re a specific age in years and even whether you’ve just had the birthday that makes you that age. It seems to me unlikely that it mattered to people, for all of prehistory and most of history, on what day they turned 18 or 21. It matters to us, because on that exact day of turning 18 or 21 (or whatever) we’re suddenly allowed to do things we couldn’t legally do the day before. And when one’s spent nearly all of one’s growing-up time waiting for the specific day when one can get a driver’s license, or legally get an alcoholic drink, or rent an apartment, or rent a car, or be in charge of one’s own medical decisions, or take a particular type of job – it’s become a habit to keep track of one’s exact age; though it does indeed gradually become the sort of thing one has to stop and think about before becoming sure of the answer – at least, until one starts having lots of medical appointments and starts getting asked for date of birth, over and over again, as one way of making sure they’re looking at the right set of records.
As I suggested, I assume the first step in celebrating a birthday is to know what day of the year it is - I.e. to specifically enumerate the days, either as days since X event (celestial, no doubt, as that was regular enough) or by diving the year into “months” and numbering the days and repeating the same pattern every year.
This sort of calendar would evolve in stages. The stars would mark events, the intellectual class would start by assigning events, then feasts that tied to those events. Once a feast day was anointed, that implied the same date (day number) every year. Once a number of celebrations or other events were tied to days of the year, then what day it was became important for planning purposes. If we’re going to assemble everyone for a big parade to celebrate the anniversary of the king’s coronation, then we have to know days of the year.
Once that happens, then lesser folk begin attaching significance to the important dates in their lives - “we were married 5 days before the spring festival”, “Ogg was born 11 days after the naked dance for the solstice”: similarly, once significances were attached to years, Ogg was also born the year before Gur II ascended the throne, making him four and five sevens years old. .
The Provence farmer may not have cared about the Year of Our Lord, but his days of the year were heavily marked out for him with an assortment of feasts and other saints’ days and for sure the local priest took pains to tell him what was in the pipeline.
I think we’re saying the same thing- while I’m sure the farmer was well aware of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I’m not so sure he was all that aware that it occurred on December 8th every year. It was probably something that happened two and a half weeks before Christmas, and the local priest made sure and let him know when both would be happening well ahead of time.
The farmer might even know that he was born on the Feast of Saint Gaétan, but he might not know that it’s August 7th, or that he was born in 1405.
Does it matter then that the farmer knows it’s “The day after All Saints” or it’s “Nov 2”? The key is knowing which day of the year - to the specific day - he was born. (So “day after Easter” would be not precise - but they’d know Easter moved around, anyway)
But I suppose the OP’s question is how far back does that sort of awareness extend? Were the days equally marked for the ancient Greeks? Homeric Greeks? The various iterations of Babylonians? I.e. did anyone besides the priests care what particular day it was each year, even if only so they could celebrate a multitude of feasts?
Parish registers containing the dates of births, deaths, and marriages were common throughout western Europe from late medieval times. Often there was a legal requirement that parish churches should maintain such registers. So it would always be possible to find out a person’s birth date (or at least the date of their baptism).
The date was announced at every mass in church, as part of the liturgical year. There were also 80-90 saint’s days and holy days per year, besides periods like Lent. The weeks would be clearly marked by Sunday church services.
Medieval peasants were mostly illiterate, but illiterate doesn’t mean innumerate or stupid. They often needed to know dates and years for practical reasons. They had obligations to work on the lord’s demesne for a certain number of days a month. Taxes, tithes and levies had to paid by certain dates. Contracts, agreements, and tenures ran to certain years and dates. Peasants needed to know the years for legal precedents and the local customs of the manor. ‘In the year xxxx, this piece of land was granted to my grandfather by Lord so-and-so’, etc.
There’s also a question of whether it mattered to them. That the day before was All Saint’s might have mattered a lot more than that the day after was the day when they were born.
And of course there is the question of whether “medieval Europe” counts as “ancient humans” for the purposes of the OP; which seemed to think that this might be something automatically built into the species, not something that needed to be taught and reinforced every week at church.
Having extensively done genealogy on my Norwegian ancestors I can tell you that this was only made compulsory in Norway in the 17th century and parishes didn’t consistently comply until close to the end of the 18th. Not all definitions of Western Europe include Norway though.
I’d argue that “the day after Easter” is as precise as a date can be – to the day. No, it’s not going to always fall on the same day of the solar calendar, but it’s always the same day of the liturgical calendar.
Was reading the account by Cabeza de Vaca about his trip across what is now the southwest US in the 1530s and came across this relevant quote:
Not all that ancient, but about a non-agricultural people living a lifestyle that wouldn’t be out of place any time in the last 100,000 years or so. It also likely that he didn’t know all the details of the cultures he passed among.
the point being, presumably, the OP’s question would rely on the individual days of the year being regularly enumerated in some way, which I presume basing on a variable feast is not.
then the point is - would the average person be aware of the culture’s precise calendar enough to associate it with events in their family life.
Obviously, with the feast cycle of medieval Europe, the first part would be true. urban Romans probably knew the days as enumerated by their calendar. Egyptians would have some awareness of the calendar if only because it told them when to head for higher ground. How widespread would the association between “day of year” and some events be for much earlier civilizations?
I did some minor sleuthing for my family tree, got a copy of the area’s parish registers transcribed on CD. There are a very few surviving entries from the late 1500’s; IIRC, England only made it compulsory for parishes in the 1600’s sometime, then the Civil War disrupted the church hierarchy so not much is written down (or survives?) before 1660’s for the average non-noble.
I guess I don’t see how the feast day “varies” any more than any other enumeration of days. I didn’t think the OP was asking “did ancient humans follow a precise solar calendar”, but rather, did they enumerate the days and keep track of when they were born and how old they were.
If you go back to hunter gather societies, would there be a reason to track birthdays? A certain stages of development, then the children would be treated differently, such as given training for necessary life skills such as hunting or making clothes, but ISTM that wouldn’t require precision in dates or perhaps even in years.
Generally tracks with what I’ve read about assigned birthdays in populations assimilated from such societies.
Ken Riddiford, the chief executive of the Kimberley Stolen Generation Aboriginal Corporation, said it was a lasting legacy of the moment Aboriginal and European cultures were thrust together.
"They know when they were born, and where they were born, but not to a timescale as such.
"Dates were never anything in particular, things were based around the seasons, so the first of July didn’t mean anything to anyone many thousands of years ago.
It’s a mistake to make general statements about ‘hunter-gatherers’ or ‘ancient humans’, as though they were all the same.
There were certainly a large number of different cultures and tribes, with different customs, knowledge, and ways of doing things. Probably some kept track of ages and some didn’t.
‘When they were born’ would be something like ‘in the early summer, when such-and-such was happening in nature’, or ‘when this constellation was visible in the east after sunset’, but without a calendar.
This argument is based on the premise that only the solar calendar defines a “year”, and that any event that moves within the solar calendar is variable within that year and doesn’t count. But if you don’t make that premise and rather accept that the liturgical year is just as good a “year” for the purposes of a calendar as the solar one, then the argument goes away; in the liturgical calendar, Easter is an unambiguously defined event that occurs annually.
(Of course, the series of feasts in Christianity is more complicated than that, since it combines feasts that are defined by reference to lunar events, such as Easter, with those that are defined within the solar calendar, such as Christmas.)